The unifying ethos of Living Docs is a belief that working in the open—sharing code and building projects using technologies that others can use and build upon—is beneficial to the documentary community. The projects we support are truly "web-native" in that they leverage the web's real-time responsiveness and potentially limitless reach.

Last summer, youth from BAVC’s advanced youth filmmaking program The Factory worked closely with Mozilla to develop four web-native short docs using Mozilla’s Popcorn Maker software. These projects, like all those supported and showcased on Living Docs, are live and interactive allowing users to be both viewers and participants.

Folks at Mozilla were so excited by The Factory web native docs that they took two of our youth to London to showcase the work and discuss their experience with Popcorn as a new tool for filmmakers. Now Mozilla is helping sponsor an Open Source track in our Digital Pathways program to encourage more youth to learn how to code, empowering them to use open source resources and to develop new web tools themselves!

Plans are brewing for a collaborative project this summer, drawing youth from all four of BAVC’s Digital Pathways tracks—All-Girl Video Production, Audio Production, 3-D Animation and Gaming, and Open Source—to make more web-native docs.

And for Fall 2012, BAVC and Mozilla are exploring the launch of a separate Web-Native track for Digital Pathways – inviting youth 14-24 to spend the entire school year doing the same: creating more web-native documentaries, and in the process, contributing more open source tools for the web-based media production community.